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Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this.

That's a broad and largely inaccurate statement.

A lot of them will care very much, but not enough to vote for a candidate with much more serious flaws.

I highly doubt it, her cult of personality is too big. Articles defending her using the tu quoque defense are already popping up. Hillary Clinton could tap dance in stilettos on a box full of puppies and PETA would praise her for mercifully saving them from a life of enslavement. If you really cared, you would simply abstain from voting for that particular office. A vote for the lesser of two evils is still evil. If the only choices I had for 2016 were Clinton or Bush, I wouldn't vote for either.

I think that's a mistake.

I think the politicians are terrible, I also know my knowledge is limited, and it's possible that I'm either underestimating them, underestimating the difficulty of the job, or underestimating the necessity of getting your hands dirty.

Just listen to this interview with someone who ran for Prime Minister of Canada and failed quite spectacularly, dirty hands are amazingly effective.

Either way abstaining entirely just hands power to the extremists who have made the situation so awful to begin with. The real solution is for as many people to vote as possible, if you vote for the politician who is slightly less evil then the next pair of candidates are going to be slightly better. It wasn't luck that trimmed the 2012 GOP field of everyone not-Romney, the Republicans realized that when dealing with an election where people paid attention and voted they couldn't get away with a Tea Partier heading the Presidential ticket. If you make a habit of not voting for "evil" candidates you're going to go from Mitt Romney to Ted Cruz, is that really the outcome you're looking for?

Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this.

That's a broad and largely inaccurate statement.

A lot of them will care very much, but not enough to vote for a candidate with much more serious flaws.

There might be some hoopla on Twitter and Fox News for a few days, and then there will be some stragglers like with Benghazi, but it will mostly fade out of the mainstream media within a few hours from now.

What does this have to do with Benghazi? If anything there's a major difference in that Clinton actually did something wrong in this one.

I fear that with the death of Gene Roddenberry and the worlds ever intense focus on money, which while always existing, has become sharpened the last decade or two, you're just not going to see a classic return to original, cheesy, fun Star Trek. It has to have an edge to appeal to the mainstream. Maybe some tits or a fistfight or someone lying or cheating or bullshit drama.In TnG when someone cheated or did something bad, it was addressed, it was weird, they investigated, found why the person was sad / angry / hateful and they fixed it because it's not productive, it's not good to be like that. Nowadays as per/the norm/ someone is going to be a piece of shit with all these complexities in a TV show, cheating / lying / playing games / one upping people is normal behaviour on standard television:/

The sad thing is that Star Trek had far more edge than almost anything on currently, they just put the edge in the ideas rather than the personal relationships.

Modern SF is either dramas or action set in space, original Star Trek was short stories set in space, I don't know if TV is ready to try that again.

Have you actually talked to an average user? Have you ever tried to get people to use Firefox over Internet Explorer? Do you remember what an uphill battle that was? Now step back and understand that you're now trying to change their operating system.

How well do you think that will go over if it was virtually impossible to get them to stop using the worst browser in the world?

The problem with arguments like yours is they're made on the basis of rationality. However the people you're talking about aren't rational most of the time.

It's not about changing their operating system. It's about choosing a different operating system when they get a new computer.

It's not great. It's only good for staunch advocates who refuse to run any other operating system. Linux still isn't good enough for joe sixpack to run it as a daily driver. Until they get joe sixpack on board, it'll forever be a niche product without enough inroads to support a gaming ecosystem.

Developers have had decades to get Linux right on the desktop, and they've failed at every turn. Even distros which did a lot more right than the others still aren't as polished and usable as the alternatives. It's time to get your head out of the sand on this, and start examining the reality. OS X has more of a chance at becoming a capable gaming OS than Linux does, and that's really saying something.

What does the typical joe sixpack need?

Web browsing? That works aside from some newer niche Flash stuff

Word processing? That works for a big majority of cases

Email? Works.

Playing Music? No iTunes, but otherwise works.

Games?.... well this is the big one.

For every common usecase there's a fairly generic app you can use to get things done regardless of the OS. Sure there's sometimes warts on Linux, but you get warts on Windows and Mac OS as well. My mother has had trouble with her Mac that take me just as much esoteric googling to figure out as anything on Linux.

But games, well that's been the problem. If you want Joe Sixpack to use your system he needs to be able to run almost every game, since Linux has never had that capability of course it's not going to become big on the desktop.

Now that's changed. Linux can do a lot of games and the major obstacle to Joe Sixpack is gone.

It's still not great (gaming is still a problem outside of Steam), and Linux still lacks the marketing power. But I could really see a lot more casual users coming on board, or even some OEMs coming on board with well configured pre-installed Linux machines, either low-end machines made cheaper by not having the Windows tax and having some crappy OEM apps added, or higher-end machines targeted towards power-users who just want a laptop with an Ubuntu or RHEL system where all the esoteric hardware works.

I am an independent inventor (and Uni. scientist by day). I have tried to sell a basket of CMOS-related patents for 10 years. All I ever hear is "not invented here."

Now, the big Corps. are suddenly "discovering" what I already patented 10 years ago. I have no choice but to sue, sue, sue.

They bring this on themselves.

This is a legit question, did you actually contribute anything when you made your patents? The 10 year lag suggests they weren't ripping off your original patent or sale proposal, though maybe they're using your academic publications the patents are based on, more likely these were simply problems they weren't interested in yet.

Not knowing anything about your patents in particular I suspect that most patents are fairly obvious once you start addressing the problem in question. But the idea that you can address a future problem with a bunch of patents, but not actually build anything to go along with it, I just don't see the value to society. It seems like a perversion of the system, like someone taking the cab to the finish line of a race without doing any actual running, the true value isn't in the finish, it's what's created along the way.

Patents are supposed to promote innovation, by your own admission your patents were ignored and didn't seem to do anything to push the technology forward, why should you be rewarded with a pile of money?

They need a new model. Streaming on its own for $10/month is clearly not enough money to go around. Spotify has infrastructure costs and has been bleeding money (I think they had a break-even or profitable quarter just recently?). Meanwhile, they also need to distribute the remainder of the already paltry $10 between a zillion artists. It makes no sense.

This strikes me as highly non-obvious, do you think the average person spends more than $10/month purchasing music?

With the US population at 320 million that's only ~$22/year per capita, not counting Spotify's cut (and whatever portion of that already comes from streaming) that's means if no-one bought music any more only 22% of the US population would have to stream to make up the difference.

I doubt there are many people spending $120/year purchasing music long term. $10/month strikes me as a wildly lucrative prospect for the music industry.

I used to think Canadians - even those out in the forsaken, endless prairies - were far more wise and progressive than us USians, but no. How long has GOP-backed and advised Harper been in power now? What happened? Was it tar sand greed? Pure apathy? The assumption they were all as 'funny' as Laughable Bublefuck Rob Ford?

Quite sad; I thought the Canadians were better than, well, just about everybody, but now no different than the rest of the Right-Wing Police State, Might Makes Right, Western world. [le sigh]

It's a combination of three things.

1) Harper isn't nearly as bad as the US right. There are certainly elements of that in his party, but he would still be a better fit as a Democrat than Republican in the US.

2) First past the post exaggerates strong minorities into big majorities. He should be PM but he shouldn't have a majority.

3) Even being a decent PM, he's still too far right for Canadians. The reason he's stuck around is he is good at winning elections, and the Liberal candidates not nearly as much. That might change, since Justin Trudeau took over he has actually out polled Harper fairly regularly, but whether Trudeau holds up through an election campaign is a big question.

The key service a Non-producing Patent holder provides is that they purchase patents from inventors. This allows the inventing company to convert their Ideas into cash. When companines die they may cease producing but their IP is still valuable. And it can be sold. It's that value that the shareholders of the company were investing in. So they were entitled to sell it. Patent "trolls" create this marketplace for Ideas and the money they pay goes on to be re-invested in other good things.

I think I understand your argument. But I think there's an important distinction: Is dead company A selling the technology to new company B, or just the right to use the technology?

If they're selling the technology, ie "company A knew how to do X, lets buy their IP so we can do X" then they're contributing something and new company B benefits from the exchange.

But if the situation is more like "we want to do X, but it turns out company A has patents on X, therefore we need so pay off those patents" then I'm a lot more skeptical. Sure company A's innovative investors make some money off of B, but that money came from B's innovative investors so I'm not sure you're actually promoting investment in innovation. Not only that but the patents added a lot of overhead, cash that would have been better used innovating by both parties.

It's sometimes hard to tell these apart because sometimes a cherished technology we all love really does have a legitimate patent holder not an ogre behind it. The Eolas patent on all web browser plug ins seems like a reasonable case. If they can really show that the basic concept of the web browser plug in was not obvious and had no prior art and that they legitmately patented it with sufficient breadth of description then it really doesn't matter that this catches everyone by surprise. It's worth a fortune obviously but that too is not a reason to say it's wrong. It would be wrong if they got lucky an patented as trivial idea and then tried to extort people with it.

As to my point I'm very skeptical Eolas actually did anything to further the development of browser plugins. Why are they entitled to a fortune when they never actually contributed anything of value?

I've come to a more nuanced view on patent trolls. They aren't themselves so evil, they are basically hackers, but of the law instead of tech. The real evil is the patent system itself, not the hackers who take advantage of it. If by their actions they persuade giants like Samsung that patent law needs major reform, then that's good. It's not their fault that patent law is such a mess, it's the fault of giant corporate backers. They're dancing delicately, trying to have it both ways, that is, little people have to ask them for their patents, but they don't have to ask little people for theirs. The bigs are the reason the scope of patent law has been expanded beyond all sense. Possibly the biggest expansion was that originally a patent was supposed to cover a working implementation. A machine that achieves the same thing through a different method was not in violation. Now patents can cover a vague concept. That kind of patent may be shot down in court, but that it was granted at all is one of the problems.

Hating a small patent troll is like shooting the messenger.

The evil is the term of the patent.

Change the term of software patents from 20 years to somewhere between 2 and 5 years (maybe hardware gets to be 10).

Small companies and independent inventors can still develop something new and have a healthy head start in either selling it or developing it into a product.

But 2-5 years isn't long enough to build an ecosystem, so you don't get a ridiculous situation where someone suddenly owns a piece of a fundamental technology like Bluetooth or MP3.

Moreover it fixes the incentives regarding patents. The current 20 year term means you can patent and forget, hoping someone else doesn't the work of developing the idea and you can then swoop in for license fees, that's where the patent trolls come in.

But a short term doesn't give you that option, the only way your patent is going to have value before it expires is if you make a push to build something with it, which is the kind of the point.

I wonder how many comets it kicked out of the cloud and have cause some ruckus here on Terra.

There was a human population collapse right around that time. The population may have fallen to less than 10,000, and we nearly went extinct. This has been blamed on the eruption of Toba, an Indonesian volcano, but that may not have been the only cause.

FTA:Currently, Scholz's star is a small, dim red dwarf in the constellation of Monoceros, about 20 light years away. However, at the closest point in its flyby of the solar system, Scholz's star would have been a 10th magnitude star - about 50 times fainter than can normally be seen with the naked eye at night.

Unless it's gravitational effect was way larger I'm not sure it would be large and close enough to have an affect.

Why is slashdot giving scammers like this the time of day? This is not a real mission to Mars. This is not even a credible attempt at one. There is no funding, no realistic plan, no details, no technology development, and nothing else that should even give the slightest hint that this is anything more than a scam.

I look at their plan and my thought is that it's more-or-less what I would do if I really wanted to launch a mission to mars. The big asterix is cost and technical expertise. They say they need 6 billion which might be feasible, big Hollywood blockbusters can run $200 million and Olympic broadcast/sponsorship would be enough to cover the budget, so if they get something credible (or at least entertaining) going then the networks might get interested. More likely might be some eccentric billionaire willing to dump a large percentage of their net worth into a vanity project.

For me the big thing is the technical and organizational expertise, I suspect they're massively underestimating the difficulty of the technical challenges and it will be a very long time before they've built up the organizational expertise to even address them. And because they're underestimating the technical difficulty I also suspect the budget is massively underestimated.

I suspect the best case for the project is a moderately successful media venture that either sets up the organization for a proper attempt in 20+ years, or spurns a government to action.

The other half is the fact that people speak up when they're passionate about something, and there's nothing that makes you as passionate as thinking you know the truth when everyone else is wrong.

Personally I think the solution is to speak up even when you don't care that much. You can't convince the fringe players that they're wrong, but you can demonstrate to them (and others) that the fringe viewpoint is a minority one.